Sarah Jane Smith arrives at the home of her Aunt Lavinia in the cozy
village of Moreton Harwood, only to find that Lavinia is nowhere to be
found. A second surprise is also waiting for Sarah: K·9 Mark III, a gift
left for her by her old friend, the Doctor. With the help of K·9 and
Lavinia's young ward, Brendan Richards, Sarah Jane starts investigating
her aunt's disappearance. In the process, they discover that Moreton
Harwood is home to a coven worshipping the pagan god Hecate... and
Brendan is next on their list of sacrificial victims.

Production

The robot dog known as K·9 was devised by writers Bob Baker and Dave
Martin for their 1977 Doctor Who serial The Invisible Enemy. Then-producer
Graham Williams saw the appeal of Baker and Martin's creation --
especially to the programme's juvenile audience -- and decided to retain
K·9 as a regular character. K·9 became a mainstay of Doctor Who
for the next three years.

On June 7th, 1980, however, it was revealed that K·9 would be written
out of Doctor Who partway through the show's eighteenth season.
New producer John Nathan-Turner had decided to drop the character
because he felt that K·9 was excessively jokey, and served as an overly
convenient plot device whose presence helped make the Doctor too
invulnerable. Immediately, however, there was a public outcry from the
programme's fans, with newspapers such as the Sun campaigning to
“save” K·9.

After the public outcry over K·9's departure, John
Nathan-Turner considered the possibility of a spin-off series

The attention gave Nathan-Turner reason to rethink K·9's future.
Although he was still determined that the character should be removed
from Doctor Who -- an event which ultimately came to pass in
1981's Warriors' Gate --
Nathan-Turner began considering the possibility of developing a spin-off
series which would feature the robot dog. Doctor Who's nineteenth
season was planned to run for twenty-eight episodes, but around the
start of 1981, Nathan-Turner obtained permission to use the budget for
two of these episodes to fund a pilot for his proposed spin-off.
Nathan-Turner announced his intentions on January 16th, by which time
John Leeson -- who had voiced K·9 during Doctor Who's fifteenth,
sixteenth and eighteenth seasons -- had agreed to participate in the
project.

Despite K·9's popularity, Nathan-Turner did not think that the metal dog
could carry a programme by himself. During the summer of 1980, he had
considered bringing a former companion back to Doctor Who, and
engaged in discussions about the return of both Sarah Jane Smith and
Leela. He now felt that Sarah Jane -- whose last Doctor Who
appearance had been in 1976's The Hand
Of Fear -- would be an ideal counterpart for K·9 in the new
series. The programme thus obtained the working title of Sarah And
K·9.

On April 29th, Nathan-Turner prepared a treatment for the pilot
episode under the new title of One Girl And Her Dog. He now
envisaged the show as harkening back to the fantasy-adventure spirit of
the Sixties programme The Avengers. Nathan-Turner's proposal saw
Sarah retiring from journalism to write cooking books in Moreton Harwood
(at this point spelt “Morton Harwood”). Aunt Lavinia leaves
her ward, Brendan, with Sarah Jane before departing for America. Sarah
brings K·9 with her to the village, having discovered his crate while
preparing to move. During the subsequent investigations into a black
magic cult, however, it would transpire that this K·9 was actually
despatched as a trap by the Doctor's Time Lord archfoe, the Master (who
had recently been revived after an absence of several years in the
Doctor Who serial The Keeper Of
Traken). Fortunately, Brendan is able to reprogram K·9 before he
can fulfill his sinister mission.

Nathan-Turner then worked on revising his storyline in conjunction with
outgoing Doctor Who script editor Antony Root; the new version
was issued on May 1st. The notion of K·9 initially being evil was
scrapped, and Sarah was now moving to Moreton Harwood to write a novel,
having recently lost her newspaper job due to a merger. It was also
suggested that Sarah Jane had newly acquired some martial arts skills.
The title changed again, to A Girl's Best Friend. Later in May,
the storyline was passed along to Terence Dudley, who was commissioned
to script the pilot. Dudley was a veteran screenwriter who had recently
completed Four To Doomsday and
Black Orchid for Doctor
Who's nineteenth season.

On May 12th, Elisabeth Sladen agreed to reprise the
character of Sarah Jane Smith

On May 12th, Elisabeth Sladen agreed to reprise the character of Sarah
Jane Smith in A Girl's Best Friend. At this point, the plan was
for a ninety-minute pilot to air at Christmas, and possibly lead to a
season of six fifty-minute episodes in the autumn of 1982. (It was
intended that Sarah Jane and K·9 would appear in each of these episodes,
supported by Brendan or Aunt Lavinia depending on the needs of the
plot.) Nathan-Turner wanted to record the pilot during June and July,
when production of Doctor Who's nineteenth season would be paused
to permit star Peter Davison to make the second season of his sitcom
Sink Or Swim. However, Sladen was not available on these dates
due to her commitments to the classics serial Gulliver In
Lilliput. This forced the taping of A Girl's Best Friend to
be postponed until November.

One of the main proponents of A Girl's Best Friend within the BBC
was Head of Drama Shaun Sutton. During the summer, however, Sutton was
succeeded by David Reid, who was less impressed with the pilot episode.
Reid felt that the plot did not merit a ninety-minute timeslot and
ordered that it be cut to fifty minutes. Meanwhile, around September,
the title changed again. It now became K·9 And Company, due to
the BBC's insistence that K·9 be featured prominently in the name of the
programme. A Girl's Best Friend was retained as the title of the
pilot episode specifically. Around this time, Dudley's relationship with
Eric Saward -- who had replaced Root as script editor -- became strained
due to the number of changes Saward was making to A Girl's Best
Friend. Dudley finally went over Saward's head to Nathan-Turner, a
move which antagonised the script editor.

To compose the theme music for K·9 And Company, Nathan-Turner
approached Ian Levine. Levine was a successful record producer, and also
an ardent Doctor Who fan who was assisting the production team
in an unofficial capacity as an advisor on Doctor Who continuity.
Levine and Nathan-Turner were both keen to develop a kinetic
American-style theme tune, and this was conveyed to Levine's songwriting
partner, Fiachra Trench, who was asked to arrange Levine's composition.
Trench worked on a synthesiser, with the intention being that the music
would then be orchestrated by Peter Howell of the BBC Radiophonic
Workshop, who was also handling the episode's incidental music. However,
Howell largely retained the synthesised flavour of the demo, much to
Levine and Trench's surprise.

John Black envisaged the opening title sequence as being
in the vein of American action series

The director assigned to A Girl's Best Friend was John Black, who
had completed the Doctor Who serials The Keeper Of Traken and Four To Doomsday during the past
year. He was originally given two weeks of location filming, but this
had to be cut in half when the length of the programme was abbreviated.
Black's first order of business was to record the title sequence on
November 12th; this took his team to the Gloucestershire communities of
Miserden, Daneway, Sheepscombe, Wishanger and Bisley. Nathan-Turner
envisaged this sequence as being in the vein of American action series
such as Hart To Hart, featuring a lot of rapid intercutting. The
final version of the titles was subsequently completed by Bob Cosford of
the BBC Graphics Department.

The first day of filming on the episode itself was November 13th. This
was based in Miserden, where the Miserden Park Estate Lodge served as
the Traceys' cottage, and the Miserden Park Estate Nursery was the
market garden. Roadway scenes were completed on the 14th, at Wishanger
Farm and Miserden Park Estate. The next day, cast and crew visited the
church ruins in North Woodchester, which posed as the site of the black
magic rituals. November 16th involved recording at several venues:
Barnsley House in Barnsley was Lavinia's home, while filming also took
place at St Andrew's Church and a petrol station in Miserden, as well as
at a crossroads in Sapperton (although this material was not used in the
finished programme). Finally, on the 17th, recording was conducted at
the post office and the police station in Bisley.

Only two studio days were required to complete A Girl's Best
Friend. No space was available in London, so cast and crew instead
repaired to the BBC's Pebble Mill studios in Birmingham, where the
Doctor Who serial Horror Of Fang
Rock had been recorded in 1977. Black chose to record the
episode's remaining scenes in story order, roughly completing the first
half on November 29th and the second half on the 30th. In the final
scene, K·9 had been scripted as reciting While Shepherds Watch Their
Flocks By Night, but in the event this was replaced by the more
secular We Wish You A Merry Christmas.

A Girl's Best Friend was originally intended to air during
Christmas week, on Monday, December 21st. However, much to
Nathan-Turner's disappointment, the airdate was delayed by a week to
December 28th at fairly short notice. To make matters worse, much of the
Northwest was unable to watch the programme due to an outage at the
Winter Hill transmitter. Despite these setbacks, A Girl's Best
Friend nonetheless secured a respectable audience of 8.4 million
viewers: better than any episode broadcast during Doctor Who's
eighteenth season.

The idea of a spin-off series was formally abandoned
around April 1982

Even still, it quickly became clear that K·9 And Company would
not proceed to a full season. Another of the pilot's chief supporters,
BBC1 Controller Bill Cotton, had recently left his position, to be
replaced by Alan Hart. Hart was underwhelmed by the idea of a K·9 And
Company series, and the project was formally abandoned around April
1982.

Nonetheless, the pairing of Sarah Jane Smith with K·9 was not completely
forgotten. The two were seen together again two years later in The Five Doctors, a 1983 special
celebrating Doctor Who's twentieth anniversary. In 2006, they
returned to greater fanfare in the Doctor Who story School Reunion. This, in turn,
lead to the commissioning of a fully-fledged Sarah Jane spin-off series,
The Sarah Jane Adventures, which premiered on New Year's Day
2007. K·9 has continued to make cameo appearances opposite Sarah since
then, but he has been withheld from taking on a regular role in The
Sarah Jane Adventures due to the efforts of his cocreator, Bob
Baker, to develop a series spotlighting K·9 himself. Featuring a mixture
of live action and animation, plans currently call for The K·9
Missions to debut in 2009.